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Big Sur
A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums
In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion."
In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion."
224 pages, Paperback
First published September 11, 1962
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33050 people want to read
About the author
Jack Kerouac
359 books11.5k followersJean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.
Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jerry Garcia and The Doors.
In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.
Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.
Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jerry Garcia and The Doors.
In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.
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January 10, 2023Kerouac is a paradox. He's simultaneously over-rated and under-rated. His worst books (particularly On the Road) are iconic and uncritically adored by teenagers and hippy-dippy morons, while his best works are overlooked.
Big Sur ranks among his best. It's Kerouac at his lowest, having been devoured by fame and digested by the vast chasm that lies between the saint he's imagined to be and the bitter, depressed, exiled, alcoholic that he really is.
Kerouac is astoundingly frank in describing his desperate attempt to deal with what he's become and to somehow reconnect with the wonder that inspired him a mere decade earlier. It's a picture of a man at odds with his iconic status. It's in direct opposition to so much of his early work that sees holiness and bliss lurking everywhere, including the gutter. And the ending, an onamonapoetic ode to the roaring coast of Big Sur, is a vision of destruction and restoration rolled into one.
Big Sur ranks among his best. It's Kerouac at his lowest, having been devoured by fame and digested by the vast chasm that lies between the saint he's imagined to be and the bitter, depressed, exiled, alcoholic that he really is.
Kerouac is astoundingly frank in describing his desperate attempt to deal with what he's become and to somehow reconnect with the wonder that inspired him a mere decade earlier. It's a picture of a man at odds with his iconic status. It's in direct opposition to so much of his early work that sees holiness and bliss lurking everywhere, including the gutter. And the ending, an onamonapoetic ode to the roaring coast of Big Sur, is a vision of destruction and restoration rolled into one.
January 19, 2025
I missed his novel "On the road" a few years ago, perhaps because I was expecting something else. I did not fully understand this madness; their philosophy was to live the moment by burning the wings but devouring everything until self-destruction. But, of course, the ardor of youth does not make people realize that excess is dangerous—quite the contrary.
In Big Sur, Kerouac realizes he has already gone too far in his dissolute life. The worst part is that, ultimately, success and this beatnik madness will be a curse he cannot manage because they sink more profoundly and more than ever; he is prey to his old demons.
He is surrounded but ultimately alone, profoundly alone.
It is a moving book. The reader is powerless and finally witnesses real perdition.
In Big Sur, Kerouac realizes he has already gone too far in his dissolute life. The worst part is that, ultimately, success and this beatnik madness will be a curse he cannot manage because they sink more profoundly and more than ever; he is prey to his old demons.
He is surrounded but ultimately alone, profoundly alone.
It is a moving book. The reader is powerless and finally witnesses real perdition.
May 16, 2007
Kerouac's last stand, for all intents and purposes. The Beat Legend is in top form here, as he describes as best as we could ask him to the sickness and insanity that plagued his final years, shortly after the publication of On the Road. We watch in horror and sometimes sick fascination as his mind and body deteriorate under the pressures of the bottle, the sudden fame, and the sadness of existence which took his life just a few years after the novel's publication. I couldn't help but feel guilty to even be reading this, and hooked on it, like a grim soap opera where I want to see just how shitty things can get for our dear protagonist over the course of the events being described.
Ah, Jack, you were one of the best we had and I believe I owe you an apology. I'm sorry I ever said a bad word about the writing you left behind for us, and I'm sorry I criticized your style for not being polished enough, not quite "F. Scott Fitzgerald" enough. It is my hope that in death you found not the horror you have outlined here, but the peace that's described in the Zen, Bhuddist, and Christian scriptures you so often cited. You were more human than you ever gave yourself credit for, and as such, subject to heights and depths of light and darkness that most of us will never be able to imagine. Whether describing joy or utter despair, you did it with a tender generosity that could make even a nervous breakdown seem like a perfectly logical response to this modern world of ours. So, thank you.
Ah, Jack, you were one of the best we had and I believe I owe you an apology. I'm sorry I ever said a bad word about the writing you left behind for us, and I'm sorry I criticized your style for not being polished enough, not quite "F. Scott Fitzgerald" enough. It is my hope that in death you found not the horror you have outlined here, but the peace that's described in the Zen, Bhuddist, and Christian scriptures you so often cited. You were more human than you ever gave yourself credit for, and as such, subject to heights and depths of light and darkness that most of us will never be able to imagine. Whether describing joy or utter despair, you did it with a tender generosity that could make even a nervous breakdown seem like a perfectly logical response to this modern world of ours. So, thank you.
June 28, 2025
Forgive me for this ramble in the kinda sorta manner of. . .
ohmygodno I did not want to read this book right now, I really did not. I am in the middle of reading the later books of the recently departed Philip Roth, unflinchingly facing decay and death, and I had to drive a few hours in a car and I am about to head west On The Road soon and so I wanted to set myself up not with a framework of aging but a sense of eternal youth of joie de vivre of zest for life and go west young man, I was looking for Dharma Bums, and yikes oh no I stumbled into the sad beat drunken Breton the delirium tremens dream of Big Sur, which I had read first at maybe twenty within a year of the time I also read another alcohol-ravaged book of self-destruction, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. Oh, I so needed Dharma Bums and got Big Sur oh god no, oops! so sad and hard to read, but finally, it has searing passages, even you Kerouac haters would have to admit are painfully powerful. Jumpin’ Jack Splash! In the ocean, the sea, whee.
Kerouac here is stream-of-consciousness and it’s a tale of two Big Surs, one he encounters alone and idyllic and writing every day and dry (that is, alcohol-free) in a friend’s cabin, a kind of fast-typed journal of peacefulness that he needs because ten years ago he was On the Road with Dean Moriarty/Cody which became a beatnik anthem for a nation of young romantics and then Jack kept drinking and Dean got thrown in jail and Jack became surrounded by a thousand or five sycophants and young guys in Dharma Bums t shirts knocking on his door to get drunk with him, and he most often agreed, though by the time of this book he felt it was a lie and a cheat to imagine that the road he personally had taken would lead to anything but ruin.
In the second section of Big Sur we experience a horrifically precise description of the alcoholic delirium tremens that he encountered on the path to his death from booze. Page after page of fighting sweet Billy, the sweet beatnik/hippie girl who only wants to heal him with love, and paranoid/psychotic hallucinations enough to swear most people off booze for at least a couple days. In the end Jack returns sadly and brokenly home to his mother.
It is tempting, if you hate On the Road and beatniks and hippies and the whole romantic period extending from the late fifties til the early seventies, to think of Big Sur as the fitting and I-told-u-so Kerouac bookend to On the Road, the pay the piper yang to the Woodstock escapist ying of those days. But this is Kerouac’s anguished tale of his own life and not a tale of a lost generation (though to read it back to back with The Sun Also Rises would be interesting, and damned depressing). Big Sur is a writer's addiction memoir, not cultural history. Kerouac names his own condition madness, but it is really just a clinical condition almost no one around helps him with, and most just "enable" him by bringing him booze--alcoholism--and boom he is dead at 47.
The book concludes with the poem “Sea” that he wrote in his dry idyllic month alone at Big Sur, and is intended as a hopeful coda, maybe. I wish I could say what his friend Allen Ginsburg says of it, “at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea,' a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur.” I like the sweet gesture of the poem there at the end, but I never liked Kerouac’s poetry and it only feels sadder knowing what The Road led him to. I didn’t "enjoy" this book, and some of the writing is just automatic writing, hot or miss, but much of it is powerful and scary and I admire his courage in facing the demons and writing it down. Hmm, now where is Dharma Bums and that old On the Road t-shirt?
ohmygodno I did not want to read this book right now, I really did not. I am in the middle of reading the later books of the recently departed Philip Roth, unflinchingly facing decay and death, and I had to drive a few hours in a car and I am about to head west On The Road soon and so I wanted to set myself up not with a framework of aging but a sense of eternal youth of joie de vivre of zest for life and go west young man, I was looking for Dharma Bums, and yikes oh no I stumbled into the sad beat drunken Breton the delirium tremens dream of Big Sur, which I had read first at maybe twenty within a year of the time I also read another alcohol-ravaged book of self-destruction, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. Oh, I so needed Dharma Bums and got Big Sur oh god no, oops! so sad and hard to read, but finally, it has searing passages, even you Kerouac haters would have to admit are painfully powerful. Jumpin’ Jack Splash! In the ocean, the sea, whee.
Kerouac here is stream-of-consciousness and it’s a tale of two Big Surs, one he encounters alone and idyllic and writing every day and dry (that is, alcohol-free) in a friend’s cabin, a kind of fast-typed journal of peacefulness that he needs because ten years ago he was On the Road with Dean Moriarty/Cody which became a beatnik anthem for a nation of young romantics and then Jack kept drinking and Dean got thrown in jail and Jack became surrounded by a thousand or five sycophants and young guys in Dharma Bums t shirts knocking on his door to get drunk with him, and he most often agreed, though by the time of this book he felt it was a lie and a cheat to imagine that the road he personally had taken would lead to anything but ruin.
In the second section of Big Sur we experience a horrifically precise description of the alcoholic delirium tremens that he encountered on the path to his death from booze. Page after page of fighting sweet Billy, the sweet beatnik/hippie girl who only wants to heal him with love, and paranoid/psychotic hallucinations enough to swear most people off booze for at least a couple days. In the end Jack returns sadly and brokenly home to his mother.
It is tempting, if you hate On the Road and beatniks and hippies and the whole romantic period extending from the late fifties til the early seventies, to think of Big Sur as the fitting and I-told-u-so Kerouac bookend to On the Road, the pay the piper yang to the Woodstock escapist ying of those days. But this is Kerouac’s anguished tale of his own life and not a tale of a lost generation (though to read it back to back with The Sun Also Rises would be interesting, and damned depressing). Big Sur is a writer's addiction memoir, not cultural history. Kerouac names his own condition madness, but it is really just a clinical condition almost no one around helps him with, and most just "enable" him by bringing him booze--alcoholism--and boom he is dead at 47.
The book concludes with the poem “Sea” that he wrote in his dry idyllic month alone at Big Sur, and is intended as a hopeful coda, maybe. I wish I could say what his friend Allen Ginsburg says of it, “at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea,' a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur.” I like the sweet gesture of the poem there at the end, but I never liked Kerouac’s poetry and it only feels sadder knowing what The Road led him to. I didn’t "enjoy" this book, and some of the writing is just automatic writing, hot or miss, but much of it is powerful and scary and I admire his courage in facing the demons and writing it down. Hmm, now where is Dharma Bums and that old On the Road t-shirt?
October 16, 2016
When I was in Saint Petersburg, Florida this past spring...( I'm going for a week again this coming December)...I noticed that in every book store I visited...Jack Kerouac's books were on display. He died in Saint Petersburg in 1969....yet his presence is still felt today in 2106 in Saint Pete.
So, when I discovered "Big Sur", was a $1.99 Kindle special recently --( having not read it) --I bought it. The writing is intimate from the start.
Now -- since reading "Big Sur", I want to rent the movie with Kate Bosworth, Jean-Marc Barr, and Josh Lucas. I saw clips... and it looks great.
So... what's this book about? Jack Kerouac spent three weeks in Big Sur.......struggles with alcoholism, and has an agonizing love affair. He describes his hallucinations---in ways that are are to imagine. He's so honest, vulnerable and clearly struggling.
Towards the end of the book Jack returns home to be with his mother-- and its all so very sad. There's a poem in this novel which he wrote called 'The Sea' ....( translating the sound of the ocean) .
A sad, tragic story surrounded by one of the most beautiful places in the world.
So, when I discovered "Big Sur", was a $1.99 Kindle special recently --( having not read it) --I bought it. The writing is intimate from the start.
Now -- since reading "Big Sur", I want to rent the movie with Kate Bosworth, Jean-Marc Barr, and Josh Lucas. I saw clips... and it looks great.
So... what's this book about? Jack Kerouac spent three weeks in Big Sur.......struggles with alcoholism, and has an agonizing love affair. He describes his hallucinations---in ways that are are to imagine. He's so honest, vulnerable and clearly struggling.
Towards the end of the book Jack returns home to be with his mother-- and its all so very sad. There's a poem in this novel which he wrote called 'The Sea' ....( translating the sound of the ocean) .
A sad, tragic story surrounded by one of the most beautiful places in the world.
January 12, 2025
This Too Shall Pass
In Big Sur, we follow the geographical and mental wanderings of the famous writer Jack Duluoz, the hero of the Duluoz Legend, as he agrees to travel across the States from NY to CA and settle for some time in a cabin located in the Big Sur Area, along the Central part of the Californian coastline.
From there on, we experience the writer's musings and observations as his mind slowly — but steadily — unhinges.
So far I've read only three works by Jack Kerouac, this one included. Nevertheless, I'm fairly certain Big Sur benefits significantly from a careful reading of other books of the Duluoz cycle, as this novel offers a striking comment on the evolution of the Beatnik phenomenon, from Duluoz/Kerouac, and somewhat seen from the inside and the outside at the same time. Also, more often than not, it works as a critical counterpoint to On the Road.
A view of Bixby Canyon, Big Sur
--------
Salient features of this book, in my opinion :
-> The keenly analytical and critical/paranoid mind of Duluoz, treating the reader to a severe assessment of the Beatnik phenomenon,
-> How the legendary smoothly emerges from the mundane in Duluoz' descriptions,
-> The constant suffusion of vivid life in the landscape, the animals, the sea ; and then during the last third, ,
-> The careful sightseeing of the sightseers by disillusionned Duluoz (the area was already crowded with tourists then),
-> The tranquil epiphany of emptiness,
-> The progressive revealing of death & its manifestations,
-> The spotless depiction of nagging feelings of not being a part of it, of always being stuck in between.
Big Sur Coast near Bixby Canyon
--------------------------
Quotes:
'Life is not an apology'
'The sea seems to yell to me GO TO YOUR DESIRE DON'T HANG AROUND HERE -- For after all the sea must be like God, God isn't asking us to mope and suffer and sit by the sea in the cold at midnight for the sake of writing down useless sounds, he gave us the tools of self reliance after all to make it straight thru bad life mortality towards Paradise maybe I hope... But some miserables like me don't even know it, when it comes to us we're amazed -- Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH... but I ran away from the seashore and never came back again without that secret knowledge: that it didn't want me there, that I was a fool to sit there in the first place, the sea has its waves, the man has his fireside, period.'
'And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) 'no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony...it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time...Yay, for this, more aloneness.'
'Everything is the same, the fog says “We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,” and the leaves say “We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that’s all, we come and go, grow and fall”—Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say “We are man-transformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we’ll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season”—The tree stumps say “We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth”—Men say “We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realize everything is the same”—While the sand says “We are sand, we already know,” and the sea says “We are always come and go, fall and plosh”—The empty blue sky of space says “All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I dont care, it still belongs to me”—The blue sky adds “Dont call me eternity, call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise: the leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the paper bag is paradise, the man is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise'
'But there’s no joy at all, people say “Oh well he’s drunk and happy let him sleep it off”–The poor drunkard is *crying*–He’s crying for his mother and father and great brother and great friend, he’s crying for help.'
'Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night's drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there'll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you're chemically overloaded and you'll have to sleep it off but cant sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in ― Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares, (nightmares of death)... well, there's more of that up later.'
'I can hear myself whining again 'Why does God torture me?' - But anybody who's never had a delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who don't drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility - The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed you and raise you and make you strong and my God even 'educate' you for life, you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you to your sick silliness - You feel sick in the greatest sense of the world, breathing without believing it, sicksicksick, your soul groans, you look at your helpless hands as tho they were on fire and you can't move to help, you look at the world with dead eyes, there's on your face an expression of incalculable repining like a constipated angel on a cloud - In fact it's actually a cancerous look you throw on the world, through browngray wool fuds over your eyes - Your tongue is white and disgusting, your teeth are stained, your hair seems to have dried out overnight, there are huge mucks in the corners of your eyes, greases on your nose, froth at the sides of your moth: in short that very disgusting and well-known hideousness everybody knows who's walked past a city street drunk in the Boweries of the world'
'What's all this giving of ourselves?'
'Oh the sad music of it all, I’ve done it all, seen it all, done everything with everybody… The whole world is coming on like a high school sophomore eager to learn what he calls new things, mind you, the same old sing-song, sad song truth of death.'
'The more ups and downs, the more joy I feel. The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel.'
Lawrence Fehrlengetti’s cabin where Kerouac wrote Big Sur
---------------
Kindred books:
Under The Volcano
The Sun Also Rises
A Scanner Darkly
VALIS
Love Is a Dog from Hell
Self-Reliance and Other Essays (referred to)
Ulysses
Music:
Sysyphus (Four Parts)- Pink Floyd
In Big Sur, we follow the geographical and mental wanderings of the famous writer Jack Duluoz, the hero of the Duluoz Legend, as he agrees to travel across the States from NY to CA and settle for some time in a cabin located in the Big Sur Area, along the Central part of the Californian coastline.
From there on, we experience the writer's musings and observations as his mind slowly — but steadily — unhinges.
So far I've read only three works by Jack Kerouac, this one included. Nevertheless, I'm fairly certain Big Sur benefits significantly from a careful reading of other books of the Duluoz cycle, as this novel offers a striking comment on the evolution of the Beatnik phenomenon, from Duluoz/Kerouac, and somewhat seen from the inside and the outside at the same time. Also, more often than not, it works as a critical counterpoint to On the Road.
A view of Bixby Canyon, Big Sur
--------
Salient features of this book, in my opinion :
-> The keenly analytical and critical/paranoid mind of Duluoz, treating the reader to a severe assessment of the Beatnik phenomenon,
-> How the legendary smoothly emerges from the mundane in Duluoz' descriptions,
-> The constant suffusion of vivid life in the landscape, the animals, the sea ; and then during the last third, ,
-> The careful sightseeing of the sightseers by disillusionned Duluoz (the area was already crowded with tourists then),
-> The tranquil epiphany of emptiness,
-> The progressive revealing of death & its manifestations,
-> The spotless depiction of nagging feelings of not being a part of it, of always being stuck in between.
Big Sur Coast near Bixby Canyon
--------------------------
Quotes:
'Life is not an apology'
'The sea seems to yell to me GO TO YOUR DESIRE DON'T HANG AROUND HERE -- For after all the sea must be like God, God isn't asking us to mope and suffer and sit by the sea in the cold at midnight for the sake of writing down useless sounds, he gave us the tools of self reliance after all to make it straight thru bad life mortality towards Paradise maybe I hope... But some miserables like me don't even know it, when it comes to us we're amazed -- Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH... but I ran away from the seashore and never came back again without that secret knowledge: that it didn't want me there, that I was a fool to sit there in the first place, the sea has its waves, the man has his fireside, period.'
'And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) 'no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony...it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time...Yay, for this, more aloneness.'
'Everything is the same, the fog says “We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,” and the leaves say “We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that’s all, we come and go, grow and fall”—Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say “We are man-transformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we’ll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season”—The tree stumps say “We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth”—Men say “We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realize everything is the same”—While the sand says “We are sand, we already know,” and the sea says “We are always come and go, fall and plosh”—The empty blue sky of space says “All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I dont care, it still belongs to me”—The blue sky adds “Dont call me eternity, call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise: the leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the paper bag is paradise, the man is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise'
'But there’s no joy at all, people say “Oh well he’s drunk and happy let him sleep it off”–The poor drunkard is *crying*–He’s crying for his mother and father and great brother and great friend, he’s crying for help.'
'Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night's drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there'll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you're chemically overloaded and you'll have to sleep it off but cant sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in ― Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares, (nightmares of death)... well, there's more of that up later.'
'I can hear myself whining again 'Why does God torture me?' - But anybody who's never had a delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who don't drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility - The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed you and raise you and make you strong and my God even 'educate' you for life, you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you to your sick silliness - You feel sick in the greatest sense of the world, breathing without believing it, sicksicksick, your soul groans, you look at your helpless hands as tho they were on fire and you can't move to help, you look at the world with dead eyes, there's on your face an expression of incalculable repining like a constipated angel on a cloud - In fact it's actually a cancerous look you throw on the world, through browngray wool fuds over your eyes - Your tongue is white and disgusting, your teeth are stained, your hair seems to have dried out overnight, there are huge mucks in the corners of your eyes, greases on your nose, froth at the sides of your moth: in short that very disgusting and well-known hideousness everybody knows who's walked past a city street drunk in the Boweries of the world'
'What's all this giving of ourselves?'
'Oh the sad music of it all, I’ve done it all, seen it all, done everything with everybody… The whole world is coming on like a high school sophomore eager to learn what he calls new things, mind you, the same old sing-song, sad song truth of death.'
'The more ups and downs, the more joy I feel. The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel.'
Lawrence Fehrlengetti’s cabin where Kerouac wrote Big Sur
---------------
Kindred books:
Under The Volcano
The Sun Also Rises
A Scanner Darkly
VALIS
Love Is a Dog from Hell
Self-Reliance and Other Essays (referred to)
Ulysses
Music:
Sysyphus (Four Parts)- Pink Floyd
December 20, 2024
Catching up…
Living where I do, not too far off of Hwy 1, on the beautiful Central Coast of California, I am fortunate to see the ocean as part of my every day walks with my husband and corgi dogs. I know how lucky I am as I take in sounds of the waves crashing onto the sand, or feeling my feet in the water, or watching the tide recede, and/or listening to the noises of the birds as they fly overhead. And that is just a moment. There are so many more.
So, years ago, when a friend suggested I read this book, it wasn’t too hard to consider, since Big Sur was a place I remember we went to as a family when I was young, and then again after I got married.
At the time, I didn’t realize what I was getting in to when I opened the pages. And as I re-visit this story again, I am reminded of this heart-ache again.
This is a story about place. The place being a cabin in Big Sur. As well as Big Sur itself. But place is just a side character. The unfortunate part are the players (the characters) that occupy the place. They are sadly messed up.
Why? Well, in a nutshell, this novel is about the effects that alcohol has on the body and soul. Binges. Disconnected from reality…especially from the beauty of the landscape, the beautiful California coast line…Big Sur that lays before the central character.
Could a redemption be forthcoming? Is the author unknowingly telling a biographical story of himself?
If nothing else, this book was an important biographical touchstone of a life of an artist possessed. It showed his sensitivity, insecurities, recklessness, low self-esteem, need for solitude, even a hatred for solitude (obvious complexities), deep depression caused by chemical indulgences. This is the books story, but clearly, we can also see it as the story of the author, too.
It appears that art converged into life, and then sadly life left him.
This book was published in 1962. Kerouac died in 1969 of an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking.
Last note…I almost gave up on finishing this book originally, because I don’t like reading books about characters that self-destruct.
But...In the world of literature, we may encounter characters whose authors reflect their own personal demons. With their story, we find vulnerabilities and creative endeavors. And an opportunity to appreciate that maybe their legacy can be a beacon, guiding us toward understanding, of their personal experience. And, we can honor their memory by embracing the imperfections and art that speaks to the human condition.
Living where I do, not too far off of Hwy 1, on the beautiful Central Coast of California, I am fortunate to see the ocean as part of my every day walks with my husband and corgi dogs. I know how lucky I am as I take in sounds of the waves crashing onto the sand, or feeling my feet in the water, or watching the tide recede, and/or listening to the noises of the birds as they fly overhead. And that is just a moment. There are so many more.
So, years ago, when a friend suggested I read this book, it wasn’t too hard to consider, since Big Sur was a place I remember we went to as a family when I was young, and then again after I got married.
At the time, I didn’t realize what I was getting in to when I opened the pages. And as I re-visit this story again, I am reminded of this heart-ache again.
This is a story about place. The place being a cabin in Big Sur. As well as Big Sur itself. But place is just a side character. The unfortunate part are the players (the characters) that occupy the place. They are sadly messed up.
Why? Well, in a nutshell, this novel is about the effects that alcohol has on the body and soul. Binges. Disconnected from reality…especially from the beauty of the landscape, the beautiful California coast line…Big Sur that lays before the central character.
Could a redemption be forthcoming? Is the author unknowingly telling a biographical story of himself?
If nothing else, this book was an important biographical touchstone of a life of an artist possessed. It showed his sensitivity, insecurities, recklessness, low self-esteem, need for solitude, even a hatred for solitude (obvious complexities), deep depression caused by chemical indulgences. This is the books story, but clearly, we can also see it as the story of the author, too.
It appears that art converged into life, and then sadly life left him.
This book was published in 1962. Kerouac died in 1969 of an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking.
Last note…I almost gave up on finishing this book originally, because I don’t like reading books about characters that self-destruct.
But...In the world of literature, we may encounter characters whose authors reflect their own personal demons. With their story, we find vulnerabilities and creative endeavors. And an opportunity to appreciate that maybe their legacy can be a beacon, guiding us toward understanding, of their personal experience. And, we can honor their memory by embracing the imperfections and art that speaks to the human condition.
April 16, 2020
I like who I am when I read Kerouac, I love all the trees that go by on this train I’m on right now and I love all the sky that’s up above and the sun, its wide rays across all these fields and then the sun when it goes all sharp and pricks through the trees – And right now I’m forgiving everyone I’ve ever hated or been sore with because what is it they are all as close to being Buddha as you are? – The light continues to make me happy the whole journey, I’m feeling pleased and the only other person in this carriage looks relaxed too and we are in a little pocket of content. I’m reading Big Sur though and sometimes looking out the window at all the grass, sometimes hay bales, now the river all glittery in the lovely sunlight and long and thin like a snake-tail – snake body, snake tail and body, one and the same – but Jack is now making me feel sad suddenly, he’s talking about him and Cody’s wife Evelyn, and how she is always maintaining that she and I were really made for each other but her Karma was to serve Cody in this particular lifetime, which I really believe and I believe she loves him, too, but she’d say ‘I’ll get you, Jack, in another lifetime…And you’ll be very happy’ and that makes me happy, at least, because I hope he will be happy with her someplace else because you know, he says I want her to say I’ll never get rid of her – I wanta be chased for eternity till I catch her. It makes me feel good to think that’s gonna happen sometime – At the station I gotta take a piss and I am now with this guy beside me and his piss is so loud and I’m thinking about Kerouac and how he is in his other life now because he went and died and it’s tearing me up inside and I’m so damn upset he only lived to 47 and I damn near punch the wall in front of me and punch the guy beside me (though he doesn’t deserve it and in the back of my mind I know it) but I think – heck – it’s okay and I’m alright I tell myself ‘come on, it isn’t that bad’ and I know I’m right – The water from the tap is hot and healing on my hands and it’s crazy because I now love this guy in the bathroom with me because he’s a beautiful damned human like me so I go out the station and the clouds are so white and fake looking and I forgot how sad I was just a minute ago – Jack’s been pretty torn up about dead things in Big Sur though is what I’m thinking now as I walk past all the strangers in the city, with that dead otter he asks himself ‘Why do they do that?’ – ‘Why did he die?’ and I think why did he? I’m thinking of the dead things I’ve seen in my time and I feel like Jack, thinking why did it all have to happen, why did stuff have to die, just couple of weeks ago we saw sheep in downs with broken legs all limp at funny angles, limping around looking so sad and it damn near broke my mum’s heart and I’m thinking about them again now too passing the cross in Chichester, thinking it made me sad too – The issue is Jack is drinking too much and he’s shouting how SICK he feels and waking up drunk or hangover, whichever one is worse and all the Beatniks aren’t helping (back at home trying to break into his house and scaring his mother half to death) especially with the death he’s been thinking about even though it isn’t human it doesn’t matter it’s enough to make you sad like those sheep I saw, those poor damn sheep, I feel bad for them still, half way up North Street. It always makes me proud to love the world somehow – Jack says and I think the same; it is hard though and that’s why it makes me proud, maybe him too. He thinks he’s going mad. Maybe he is. No, I don’t want to think like that but it’s true, God, I think, now I’m in College Lane, I hate the number 47 forever now –
So the Big Sur is over the next day, I cleaned it off with four coffees or five. The light’s all fading already, January has been cold so far but I like girls when their noses go red – I think it’s cute. Jack’s been honest this time and it’s been breaking my heart hearing it. Next time I’m walking in town I’ll look at the sea maybe, think of James Joyce or whatever – Pluto eats the sea –/ Ami go – da – che pop/Go – Come – Cark -/ Care – Kee ter da vo. In the end though this has all been said a long time ago and I’m only hearing it now too late for anything. Doesn’t matter. It still makes me sad – There’s no need to say another word.
So the Big Sur is over the next day, I cleaned it off with four coffees or five. The light’s all fading already, January has been cold so far but I like girls when their noses go red – I think it’s cute. Jack’s been honest this time and it’s been breaking my heart hearing it. Next time I’m walking in town I’ll look at the sea maybe, think of James Joyce or whatever – Pluto eats the sea –/ Ami go – da – che pop/Go – Come – Cark -/ Care – Kee ter da vo. In the end though this has all been said a long time ago and I’m only hearing it now too late for anything. Doesn’t matter. It still makes me sad – There’s no need to say another word.
June 14, 2023
A world weary Kerouac seeks a physical and spiritual retreat...I so wish he would have found both and stayed with us a little longer. It would have been nice to see what works he would have produced past his 50th year; sad to say I think we have lost much from his untimely passing.
July 6, 2022
My fourth Kerouac, and the best I have read of him so far. But, unlike the others where he simply goes a wandering from one place to the next, Big Sur mostly takes place in, Big Sur, California. Damn, what I'd give to be there now. All that sun. I'm due a much needed break.
Jack Duluoz (the fictional Kerouac) who is suffering with mental and physical exhaustion as a result of not being able to cope with a life in the public eye seeks comfort in a secluded cabin. There he drinks, types, drinks some more. Actually he drinks a lot. In fact Big Sur is a novel about the effects alcohol has on the body and soul. Kerouac’s description of the paranoia and existential disconnectedness he feels during his marathon binges makes for some pretty despairing writing, but then that is the whole point. Big Sur eschews the almost Transcendentalist hopefulness of On the Road for the most negative kind of existentialism. There is no majesty in the waves against the rocks as Kerouac looks out at the ocean, only the horror that life and all of its meaning seems a deep nothingness, as abruptly as the coast disappears into the water. Even the landscape fills him with a sense of impending dread.
Characters from his other novels do crop up, but I feel like this is jack at his most cut off from the world. The first-person descent into madness and psychotic delirium that takes hold leads to one of his most powerful works. It's certainly not a book to be inspired by like some of his other novels, but his wry observations and thoughts under the influence of alcohol did make for some compelling reading. For those who are big fans of both On the Road and The Dharma Bums this might lead to disappointment, but I was more impressed with this.
March 20, 2014
Grabbed Big Sur after avoiding it for sometime. Grabbed Big Sur as I walked out the door for my third solo trip to Big Sur. Because I had had enough. Enough of everything. As I said to someone on my way out, "I just need to not talk to anybody for a little bit."
So I grabbed Big Sur, not knowing exactly what it was about.
I bombed the curves of Big Sur, passing people I shouldn't have passed.
Got to my campsite, and set up camp. After people told me I shouldn't, no, I *couldn't* camp alone. I'm a girl.
Actually, I'm a grown-ass woman, and I can handle myself.
Grabbed Big Sur.
Hiked 11 miles. Because there is nothing like hiking in Big Sur. Chaparral, redwoods, ocean. The Santa Lucia mountains abruptly rise from the Pacific, creating an amazing and unrivaled ecosystem and landscape. Wildflowers. Scouted out the next campsite for the next trip, in which I backpack in. Because "girls" shouldn't backpack alone, either.
Came back to camp. Read Big Sur while sunbathing, yogaishing, cooking dinner, and... drinking a hot toddy. Read Big Sur under the night sky with the full moon rising over the Santa Lucias. Read Big Sur in my sleeping bag, my tent dripping with condensation, a raccoon perusing what I left out.
Big Sur is like being hit square in the stomach with a 2x4. Kerouac's brutal honesty toward his state of mind. It was meant to happen in Big Sur, where the ocean is bigger than your problems, the redwoods are older than your family, and the mountains are higher than your state of being.
It was the perfect time, the perfect visit, the perfect setting for me to finally read Big Sur and to reacquaint myself with Kerouac. Did I identify with him? Not really, but his prose in this novel brings forth something that lies within us all, don't you think?
Read it in one sitting.
And:
“On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars - Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word.”
"because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned..." //147
So I grabbed Big Sur, not knowing exactly what it was about.
I bombed the curves of Big Sur, passing people I shouldn't have passed.
Got to my campsite, and set up camp. After people told me I shouldn't, no, I *couldn't* camp alone. I'm a girl.
Actually, I'm a grown-ass woman, and I can handle myself.
Grabbed Big Sur.
Hiked 11 miles. Because there is nothing like hiking in Big Sur. Chaparral, redwoods, ocean. The Santa Lucia mountains abruptly rise from the Pacific, creating an amazing and unrivaled ecosystem and landscape. Wildflowers. Scouted out the next campsite for the next trip, in which I backpack in. Because "girls" shouldn't backpack alone, either.
Came back to camp. Read Big Sur while sunbathing, yogaishing, cooking dinner, and... drinking a hot toddy. Read Big Sur under the night sky with the full moon rising over the Santa Lucias. Read Big Sur in my sleeping bag, my tent dripping with condensation, a raccoon perusing what I left out.
Big Sur is like being hit square in the stomach with a 2x4. Kerouac's brutal honesty toward his state of mind. It was meant to happen in Big Sur, where the ocean is bigger than your problems, the redwoods are older than your family, and the mountains are higher than your state of being.
It was the perfect time, the perfect visit, the perfect setting for me to finally read Big Sur and to reacquaint myself with Kerouac. Did I identify with him? Not really, but his prose in this novel brings forth something that lies within us all, don't you think?
Read it in one sitting.
And:
“On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars - Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word.”
"because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned..." //147
August 14, 2018
Should you read this book? Well, to quote Jack Kerouac himself, “I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference."
What inspired me to read Big Sur, which I somehow skipped in all earlier Kerouac stints, was Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar's 2009 LP: One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur. If you've not heard about the album, its genesis was Kerouac’s nephew Jim Sampas requesting songwriter Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt) to compose some songs based on the Big Sur text for the soundtrack of a documentary film attempting to depict the period of Kerouac's life when he was dogged by the celebrity resulting from the big sales success of On The Road, trying to quit drinking and writing this novel.
According to Noel Murray's review of the album in the A.V. Club, the original intention was for a variety of name musicians to perform Farrar's compositions with him, but he clicked so well with Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) in preliminary production that the two of them completed all 12 tracks. The album is a damned fine listen in my opinion, but it’s the title track—which I believe I read somewhere is more a Gibbard than Farrar composition—that manages to illuminate something quintessential about my perceptions of Kerouac, particularly the Kerouac of this final novel who can look back on all the excesses and holy goofs from the roads of his erstwhile youth and wonder if it was all worth it. As far as I can tell, the only line in the song's lyric that comes from Big Sur is the title/chorus ("one fast move or I'm gone"), but all the other words ring true to the Kerouac I see in my mind's eye after having read seven of his novels and (a long time ago) Ann Charters' biography.
Listen to at least the title track yourself, paying close attention to the words. Whether it was Gibbard or Farrar (or both) who wrote them, they really hit upon what I see as the core of Kerouac. During one of my earliest times listening to the song, I found myself thinking of the beautifully turned close of the first chapter in Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, where a third person narrative voice, rarely if ever used in Kerouac's later work, describes the exterior of the Martin family's house: "When all the family was stilled in sleep, when the streetlamp a few paces from the house shone at night and made grotesque shadows of the trees upon the house, when the river sighed off in the darkness, when the trains hooted on their way to Montreal far upriver, when the wind swished in the soft treeleaves and something knocked and rattled on the old barn—you could stand in old Galloway Road and look at this home and know that there is nothing more haunting than a house at night when the family is asleep, something strangely tragic, something beautiful forever."
I'm not trying to romanticize the man. That has been done to death way before Gap used an airbrushed version of one of Jerry Yulsman's Kerouac photos to move units, before a living William Burroughs starred in a Nike commercial ("Who couldn't use such easy money, kid, I'm hustling myself," I can almost hear him croak in defense), in other words, before American commerce learned to pimp hip so hard that anyone foolish enough to be a true believer was left to wonder whether they missed the bang or whimper that had heralded everything cool tipping over into a vat of meretricious shit. But that too is a case of "twas ever thus, science and time have only made it worse." More on that in a minute.
What I am trying to say is that the man could write and write well when he put his mind to it. One of the most important things a writer can do, besides tell a story, is make a reader feel something. And few writers can make me feel loneliness like Kerouac could. Similar to what Burroughs has written about Hemingway and the subject of death, loneliness was Kerouac's thing, his specialty. Sure, you find a fair share of exhilarating headlong rushes into life that "burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding" in Kerouac's body of work but is it that much of a stretch to imagine those were inspired by the desire to take flight from a haunting inherent loneliness? And, I think, it's when his prose strives to convey the bedrock loneliness of the human condition—or at least his condition—that it really takes off to a place beyond ultimately predictable descriptions of what it feels like to be on the passenger side of car expertly driven at breakneck speeds.
Having decided to read Big Sur, I went online and bought a used copy of the original 1963 Bantam Books paperback edition (original cover price-75¢!). The synopsis blurb on the cover page is at least 75 cents worth of hilarity. Consider the following:
Clearly the boys in the marketing division of Bantam Paperback Books thought it best to reduce anything that might have been authentic, original, artistic or (god help us) hip about the novel to teaser copy that reads like it would have been more at home on a poster for a B-movie horror flick. This is what I meant by "twas ever thus, science and time have only made it worse." The ad executives from a couple of yesteryears ago thought people could be swayed to buy Gap clothes if they were associated with the images of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac. Further back in '63 apparently some creepy Don Draper types thought the best way to sell Jack Kerouac’s final novel was to render an overview of it in third rate Mickey Spillane type bombast.
But, I can hear you asking through clenched teeth at this point, what did you think of the goddamned novel? When I told several people I planned to read it, I was warned that it’s a bleak, unsparing “breakdown” novel and that Kerouac would take me right along with him. That’s true enough. In dramatic contrast to Visions of Cody (which I thought was a travesty), I’m glad I read Big Sur. Seldom did I find the book taking me away from myself in the way books that I think are truly great do, but it was aggressively honest of Kerouac to stick with his self-aggrandized autobiography as legend approach to his novels after things were not nearly as fun for him as they once were.
Here’s a thought that’s immediate, unrehearsed, unrevised and probably more than a little bit irresponsible (seems like Kerouac would, if not approve, perhaps recognize a kindred spirit): yesterday I listened to Mark Helprin being interviewed about his newest book In Sunlight and In Shadow. I’ve not read it yet nor have I read Helprin’s most famous book Winter’s Tale. I might find myself duly impressed—taken away from myself even—by either of those books when I do finally get around to reading them. But good lord almighty did the man sound so pedantic, so full of himself, so much like someone I would not want to sit down and have a beer with (I’m confident he would see no value in having any exchange with me either) and so convinced of his relevance, if not his superiority, that I shuddered.
When Kerouac, on the other hand, writes in Big Sur “Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I’ll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth,” I feel like the human being who was on the other end of that writing would never have shoveled Helprin’s brand of shit in my direction for very long, even if I let him get away with it. But this—as I warned—is hardly a sensible position. Just pure gut. In this book, and in all of his others that I’ve read, Kerouac is interesting when he’s interesting and not when he’s not, but he’s always pure gut.
What inspired me to read Big Sur, which I somehow skipped in all earlier Kerouac stints, was Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar's 2009 LP: One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur. If you've not heard about the album, its genesis was Kerouac’s nephew Jim Sampas requesting songwriter Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt) to compose some songs based on the Big Sur text for the soundtrack of a documentary film attempting to depict the period of Kerouac's life when he was dogged by the celebrity resulting from the big sales success of On The Road, trying to quit drinking and writing this novel.
According to Noel Murray's review of the album in the A.V. Club, the original intention was for a variety of name musicians to perform Farrar's compositions with him, but he clicked so well with Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) in preliminary production that the two of them completed all 12 tracks. The album is a damned fine listen in my opinion, but it’s the title track—which I believe I read somewhere is more a Gibbard than Farrar composition—that manages to illuminate something quintessential about my perceptions of Kerouac, particularly the Kerouac of this final novel who can look back on all the excesses and holy goofs from the roads of his erstwhile youth and wonder if it was all worth it. As far as I can tell, the only line in the song's lyric that comes from Big Sur is the title/chorus ("one fast move or I'm gone"), but all the other words ring true to the Kerouac I see in my mind's eye after having read seven of his novels and (a long time ago) Ann Charters' biography.
Listen to at least the title track yourself, paying close attention to the words. Whether it was Gibbard or Farrar (or both) who wrote them, they really hit upon what I see as the core of Kerouac. During one of my earliest times listening to the song, I found myself thinking of the beautifully turned close of the first chapter in Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, where a third person narrative voice, rarely if ever used in Kerouac's later work, describes the exterior of the Martin family's house: "When all the family was stilled in sleep, when the streetlamp a few paces from the house shone at night and made grotesque shadows of the trees upon the house, when the river sighed off in the darkness, when the trains hooted on their way to Montreal far upriver, when the wind swished in the soft treeleaves and something knocked and rattled on the old barn—you could stand in old Galloway Road and look at this home and know that there is nothing more haunting than a house at night when the family is asleep, something strangely tragic, something beautiful forever."
I'm not trying to romanticize the man. That has been done to death way before Gap used an airbrushed version of one of Jerry Yulsman's Kerouac photos to move units, before a living William Burroughs starred in a Nike commercial ("Who couldn't use such easy money, kid, I'm hustling myself," I can almost hear him croak in defense), in other words, before American commerce learned to pimp hip so hard that anyone foolish enough to be a true believer was left to wonder whether they missed the bang or whimper that had heralded everything cool tipping over into a vat of meretricious shit. But that too is a case of "twas ever thus, science and time have only made it worse." More on that in a minute.
What I am trying to say is that the man could write and write well when he put his mind to it. One of the most important things a writer can do, besides tell a story, is make a reader feel something. And few writers can make me feel loneliness like Kerouac could. Similar to what Burroughs has written about Hemingway and the subject of death, loneliness was Kerouac's thing, his specialty. Sure, you find a fair share of exhilarating headlong rushes into life that "burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding" in Kerouac's body of work but is it that much of a stretch to imagine those were inspired by the desire to take flight from a haunting inherent loneliness? And, I think, it's when his prose strives to convey the bedrock loneliness of the human condition—or at least his condition—that it really takes off to a place beyond ultimately predictable descriptions of what it feels like to be on the passenger side of car expertly driven at breakneck speeds.
Having decided to read Big Sur, I went online and bought a used copy of the original 1963 Bantam Books paperback edition (original cover price-75¢!). The synopsis blurb on the cover page is at least 75 cents worth of hilarity. Consider the following:
A NIGHTMARE SUMMER
DULUOZ—The King of the Beatniks—tortured, broken idol of a whole generation; great modern sex god who just wanted to be alone with his cat; all-time boozer of the century who was slowly drinking himself out of his mind.
BILLIE—his fashion-model mistress who knew every dirty trick in the book. Duluoz was her man, meal ticket and stud rolled up into one, and she wasn't going to let him get away from her no matter what!
ELLIOT—Billie's son—he saw things that would make any adult flinch.
AND
BIG SUR—the lonely, wild surf-pounded shore where Duluoz went to hide; where the world tracked him down and made its final attempt to destroy him.
Clearly the boys in the marketing division of Bantam Paperback Books thought it best to reduce anything that might have been authentic, original, artistic or (god help us) hip about the novel to teaser copy that reads like it would have been more at home on a poster for a B-movie horror flick. This is what I meant by "twas ever thus, science and time have only made it worse." The ad executives from a couple of yesteryears ago thought people could be swayed to buy Gap clothes if they were associated with the images of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac. Further back in '63 apparently some creepy Don Draper types thought the best way to sell Jack Kerouac’s final novel was to render an overview of it in third rate Mickey Spillane type bombast.
But, I can hear you asking through clenched teeth at this point, what did you think of the goddamned novel? When I told several people I planned to read it, I was warned that it’s a bleak, unsparing “breakdown” novel and that Kerouac would take me right along with him. That’s true enough. In dramatic contrast to Visions of Cody (which I thought was a travesty), I’m glad I read Big Sur. Seldom did I find the book taking me away from myself in the way books that I think are truly great do, but it was aggressively honest of Kerouac to stick with his self-aggrandized autobiography as legend approach to his novels after things were not nearly as fun for him as they once were.
Here’s a thought that’s immediate, unrehearsed, unrevised and probably more than a little bit irresponsible (seems like Kerouac would, if not approve, perhaps recognize a kindred spirit): yesterday I listened to Mark Helprin being interviewed about his newest book In Sunlight and In Shadow. I’ve not read it yet nor have I read Helprin’s most famous book Winter’s Tale. I might find myself duly impressed—taken away from myself even—by either of those books when I do finally get around to reading them. But good lord almighty did the man sound so pedantic, so full of himself, so much like someone I would not want to sit down and have a beer with (I’m confident he would see no value in having any exchange with me either) and so convinced of his relevance, if not his superiority, that I shuddered.
When Kerouac, on the other hand, writes in Big Sur “Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I’ll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth,” I feel like the human being who was on the other end of that writing would never have shoveled Helprin’s brand of shit in my direction for very long, even if I let him get away with it. But this—as I warned—is hardly a sensible position. Just pure gut. In this book, and in all of his others that I’ve read, Kerouac is interesting when he’s interesting and not when he’s not, but he’s always pure gut.
January 7, 2008
I think this is Kerouac's most honest work. On the Road is awesome and I love it's exuberance for life and experience, but it's ultimately a book of youth- all go go go without a thought or consideration of others or consequences. that's fine when you're 25, 26, 27... but as I've gotten older, I've come to regard On the Road as somewhat "blind" exuberance... and Big Sur is the cliff that Kerouac jumps right off full speed with his eyes open. Big Sur is a crack-up book and it shows how Kerouac lost his mind to alcohol. In this book, Kerouac describes his regimin of drinking in painful detail, and still manages to sound somewhat go go go ish in boyish On the Road terms. Jack never grew up, as we can see by the unconvincing ending to this book- all hell and horror falling apart and then- Bam! Everything is Fine... right. Kerouac would die a few years later from an abdominal hemmorage caused by gut rot from too much wine. He documented his horror, but couldn't escape.
December 1, 2020
Sometimes I live in the country.
I thought that I was going to be in for a treat, but I found that I disliked this book. Some say that this book represented his downfall, but I don’t know why since he lived another 7 years and got married two more times. Was this his last book? He was drinking too much, and then for a week, the last chapter of this book, he was drinking and not eating. His depression was deep and his mind, rambling, and it actually gave me a headache. But I was finished with the book by then, so took an aspirin and went to bed.
Early on, when listening to his talk about Buddhism and his depression in which the grass was said to be “sad Grass,” and his temporary girlfriend’s hair, “sad blonde hair,’ I thought that he should go into a Buddhist monastery, and when at the end of this book, his girlfriend said, “Jack, let’s go into a monastery,” thinking it was a solution, I laughed. It was the only time I laughed in the entire book, but it wasn’t meant to be funny anyway.
I started out enjoying the book, after all he was going to stay alone in a cabin for 3 weeks at Big Sur. What could be more lovely? Well, the Smokies in the fall could be. His descriptions of the land and nature on his walk to the cabin were wonderful which made me think, he can really write when he isn’t writing that crazy beat poetry of his that I hate. I even hate the beat of it when it is read.
Well, he gets to the cabin and begins feeding the birds and a little mouse, even Alf, the mule that he sometimes says is a burro, but he knows he is just a mule. He walks across or under the highway to see the farmhouses, walks along the beach, and even saves the bugs from drowning in a river. He doesn’t seem to be drinking much either, or I am too caught up in nature to notice. But then, he gets bored, opens the rat poison container that he had closed when arriving and leaves for San Francisco where he gets with his friends and gets drunk. Stayes drunk. Then they all head back to Big Sur, and now Big Sur looks more dangerous than before. It always has been with its winding narrow highway that makes you realize if you look at the ocean too long while driving, you could become one with it, driving right off the highway, tumbling down a cliff.
I didn’t read “On the Road” when I was in Berkeley, but I had heard of it and knew that all the kids that came into town with backpacks were hitchhiking across America. I was jealous. Then I took a creative writing course, and the professor introduced us to Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “Howl” and another about a supermarket. Both were good, “How” was excellent. His others, that I tried to read later, did not make any sense. I just didn’t get it. Years later in the late 1980s I began reading beat literature, if you want to call it that. First, I read Allen Ginsberg’s biography, some poems, then “On the Road,” and “Junky.” I stopped reading them all but had always said that I would read more of Kerouac, so this book and maybe “The Subterranean.” I should have read them while in Berkeley because I was much less judgmental of people’s lifestyles, for while nott being a Christian then, my later Buddhist training taught me to not harm others, and that is where I am now in life, although no longer a Buddhist, no longer believing in karma, knowing that this teaching harms, I still hold on to the other.
I, at least, thought that there would be interesting conversations in this book, but much of it was about his own feelings, his depression, and how everything looked bad or sad. I suppose this is the fault of years of drinking, which is really sad, to use his own word. He certainly was no longer the Kerouac that loved life.
I thought that I was going to be in for a treat, but I found that I disliked this book. Some say that this book represented his downfall, but I don’t know why since he lived another 7 years and got married two more times. Was this his last book? He was drinking too much, and then for a week, the last chapter of this book, he was drinking and not eating. His depression was deep and his mind, rambling, and it actually gave me a headache. But I was finished with the book by then, so took an aspirin and went to bed.
Early on, when listening to his talk about Buddhism and his depression in which the grass was said to be “sad Grass,” and his temporary girlfriend’s hair, “sad blonde hair,’ I thought that he should go into a Buddhist monastery, and when at the end of this book, his girlfriend said, “Jack, let’s go into a monastery,” thinking it was a solution, I laughed. It was the only time I laughed in the entire book, but it wasn’t meant to be funny anyway.
I started out enjoying the book, after all he was going to stay alone in a cabin for 3 weeks at Big Sur. What could be more lovely? Well, the Smokies in the fall could be. His descriptions of the land and nature on his walk to the cabin were wonderful which made me think, he can really write when he isn’t writing that crazy beat poetry of his that I hate. I even hate the beat of it when it is read.
Well, he gets to the cabin and begins feeding the birds and a little mouse, even Alf, the mule that he sometimes says is a burro, but he knows he is just a mule. He walks across or under the highway to see the farmhouses, walks along the beach, and even saves the bugs from drowning in a river. He doesn’t seem to be drinking much either, or I am too caught up in nature to notice. But then, he gets bored, opens the rat poison container that he had closed when arriving and leaves for San Francisco where he gets with his friends and gets drunk. Stayes drunk. Then they all head back to Big Sur, and now Big Sur looks more dangerous than before. It always has been with its winding narrow highway that makes you realize if you look at the ocean too long while driving, you could become one with it, driving right off the highway, tumbling down a cliff.
I didn’t read “On the Road” when I was in Berkeley, but I had heard of it and knew that all the kids that came into town with backpacks were hitchhiking across America. I was jealous. Then I took a creative writing course, and the professor introduced us to Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “Howl” and another about a supermarket. Both were good, “How” was excellent. His others, that I tried to read later, did not make any sense. I just didn’t get it. Years later in the late 1980s I began reading beat literature, if you want to call it that. First, I read Allen Ginsberg’s biography, some poems, then “On the Road,” and “Junky.” I stopped reading them all but had always said that I would read more of Kerouac, so this book and maybe “The Subterranean.” I should have read them while in Berkeley because I was much less judgmental of people’s lifestyles, for while nott being a Christian then, my later Buddhist training taught me to not harm others, and that is where I am now in life, although no longer a Buddhist, no longer believing in karma, knowing that this teaching harms, I still hold on to the other.
I, at least, thought that there would be interesting conversations in this book, but much of it was about his own feelings, his depression, and how everything looked bad or sad. I suppose this is the fault of years of drinking, which is really sad, to use his own word. He certainly was no longer the Kerouac that loved life.
October 18, 2024
Jack Kerouac openly recounts a difficult period of his life, in which he falls into alcoholism, breaking away from the usual romanticism of the Beat Generation. The fame that came on the wave of success from his previous books, instead of bringing joy, weighs on him and leads to an inner crisis. He reveals his inner experiences as he sinks deeper into severe alcohol-induced despair. The book is especially interesting when read after The Dharma Bums and On the Road — it's like the completion of a trilogy. However, it's unfortunate that familiar characters, based on real people, are once again presented under fictional names. Big Sur contrasts the initial joy and euphoria of his earlier works with a stark portrayal of depression.
The main strength of the book is its sincerity. Kerouac effectively conveys how he steadily descends into a "dark cosmos," losing his sanity and tormenting everyone around him. His reflections on life and fame add depth to the novel and make the reader ponder.
Overall, Big Sur is an important, though challenging, work by Kerouac. It honestly showcases his personal problems and the price he paid. The novel offers a valuable, albeit bleak, insight into the consequences of the relentless pursuit of complete freedom.
The main strength of the book is its sincerity. Kerouac effectively conveys how he steadily descends into a "dark cosmos," losing his sanity and tormenting everyone around him. His reflections on life and fame add depth to the novel and make the reader ponder.
Overall, Big Sur is an important, though challenging, work by Kerouac. It honestly showcases his personal problems and the price he paid. The novel offers a valuable, albeit bleak, insight into the consequences of the relentless pursuit of complete freedom.
October 24, 2018
Kerouac struggles with the knowledge that he is trash as a human, and also trash as a writer.
He tries to get away to one of the most gorgeous locations in North America, but he trashes it up with his trashy tag-along acquaintances.
End of the book includes grotesque, obscene hallucinations, child abuse, and an absolutely terrible poem.
I enjoyed the first 30-40%, because it looked like the author was finding himself in nature, becoming obsessed with the sea and trying to learn its crashy swishy language. . . Cute and harmless. But he gets bored and resumes his stinking drunk ways.
Seems like Jack Kerouac was an easygoing, talented guy. He fell in with quite an inspirational crowd, he used up a ton of energy suppressing homosexual leanings; he struggled with alcoholism. And meanwhile fame ate away at him. Obviously his publishers would put out any shit he slapped together on paper. Result: Big Sur
He tries to get away to one of the most gorgeous locations in North America, but he trashes it up with his trashy tag-along acquaintances.
End of the book includes grotesque, obscene hallucinations, child abuse, and an absolutely terrible poem.
I enjoyed the first 30-40%, because it looked like the author was finding himself in nature, becoming obsessed with the sea and trying to learn its crashy swishy language. . . Cute and harmless. But he gets bored and resumes his stinking drunk ways.
Seems like Jack Kerouac was an easygoing, talented guy. He fell in with quite an inspirational crowd, he used up a ton of energy suppressing homosexual leanings; he struggled with alcoholism. And meanwhile fame ate away at him. Obviously his publishers would put out any shit he slapped together on paper. Result: Big Sur
September 2, 2021
It's all fun and games till it ain't, this is the ain't part, the "Duluoz" crack-up novel installment set pinballing from San Francisco to Big Sur back an forth and peopled by the usual suspects of Beat Gen. notables, but really it's a mostly dyad between Dulouz, the Big Sur location and the sea in particular, that mix of devils brew, a tempest that threatens his will to go on. Booze will kill you eventually and it did for Kerouac, but not before he'd amassed a respectable oeuvre of personal novels all electroning around the nucleus of "On The Road" like sentinels guarding the ju ju so the bop won't flop an pinwheel off into the gawping maw of samsara again annagain. But really it was never about nirvana now wassit? Come home to God and Mother like a good boy, Jack, it was all just a dream.
January 22, 2014
Jack Kerouac is not for everyone. "It's not writing, it's typing." said Truman Capote. I have read a good amount of Kerouac and his contemporaries' works. Usually I would rank him 3 to 4 stars.
Big Sur is different. The book stays with me. It's bittersweet. It follows the same character line-up, the people in Kerouac's novel, are people from his real life, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, etc. It is very helpful to know which characters refer to specific people.
The focus is on the "beat scene" in and around San Francisco.
A key difference in this book compared to his others, Jack, creates his alter-ego as a successful author, well known to the public. He is coping with the stress of fame as he is trying to heal up his alcoholism. This book is about alcoholism. He is surrounded by friends who care for him, enable him, chastise him. Jack shows you his paranoia, his nightmares, delusions, his self-hatred and envy of friends who "pull it of". Jack harbors a lot of unfulfilled desire to be a "family man" the "pater familiias" or as he often states "the He-Man" but he knows he can't live that dream because of alcohol.
We get to see Jack in solitude (at the cabin in Big Sur), in San Francisco, in domestic scenes with friends' families. He reflects on times past, especially with Neal Cassady and Neal's wife. There is a sense of loss in this novel. The writing is very playful, rambling and tangential. Rarely profound. But the presentation of Jack as he is, warts and all, famous and dying from alcohol addiction, it makes for an amazing read: Big Sur is not the beginning of the end of Jack, it is nearly the last act.
Big Sur is different. The book stays with me. It's bittersweet. It follows the same character line-up, the people in Kerouac's novel, are people from his real life, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, etc. It is very helpful to know which characters refer to specific people.
The focus is on the "beat scene" in and around San Francisco.
A key difference in this book compared to his others, Jack, creates his alter-ego as a successful author, well known to the public. He is coping with the stress of fame as he is trying to heal up his alcoholism. This book is about alcoholism. He is surrounded by friends who care for him, enable him, chastise him. Jack shows you his paranoia, his nightmares, delusions, his self-hatred and envy of friends who "pull it of". Jack harbors a lot of unfulfilled desire to be a "family man" the "pater familiias" or as he often states "the He-Man" but he knows he can't live that dream because of alcohol.
We get to see Jack in solitude (at the cabin in Big Sur), in San Francisco, in domestic scenes with friends' families. He reflects on times past, especially with Neal Cassady and Neal's wife. There is a sense of loss in this novel. The writing is very playful, rambling and tangential. Rarely profound. But the presentation of Jack as he is, warts and all, famous and dying from alcohol addiction, it makes for an amazing read: Big Sur is not the beginning of the end of Jack, it is nearly the last act.
August 21, 2020
Reading this, I can't help but think how much I like Jack Kerouac the person so much more than Jack Kerouac the writer. I know he didn't have a recording device, but it reads like the book is a recorded transcript of his unedited thoughts. Whatever comes out. Making more of a Big Sur Diary than a Big Sur novel.
As you read, you see it's later in his career. He references the 10 "novels" he's already written, that he is "famous," that too many people are hectoring him and lining up to be beatnik wannabes. Tired of his reputation and fame, he flees, but you can't just shake stuff like that.
Most memorable in this book? All the drinking. The strength lies in Kerouac's ability to show us the trap of alcoholism. Nobody likes hanging around an alcoholic, and that's just what we're forced to do reading this. Only it's all on paper vs. real life, so our sympathy is inspired. We feel sorry for the guy. We also know what he doesn't: that he'll be dead at the ridiculous age of 47 thanks to the poison of alcohol. Jack worried too much about killing fish and mice and too little about killing himself.
As you read, you see it's later in his career. He references the 10 "novels" he's already written, that he is "famous," that too many people are hectoring him and lining up to be beatnik wannabes. Tired of his reputation and fame, he flees, but you can't just shake stuff like that.
Most memorable in this book? All the drinking. The strength lies in Kerouac's ability to show us the trap of alcoholism. Nobody likes hanging around an alcoholic, and that's just what we're forced to do reading this. Only it's all on paper vs. real life, so our sympathy is inspired. We feel sorry for the guy. We also know what he doesn't: that he'll be dead at the ridiculous age of 47 thanks to the poison of alcohol. Jack worried too much about killing fish and mice and too little about killing himself.
September 16, 2017
The sea seems to yell to me GO TO YOUR DESIRE DON'T HANG AROUND HERE -- For after all the sea must be like God, God isn't asking us to mope and suffer and sit by the sea in the cold at midnight for the sake of writing down useless sounds, he gave us the tools of self reliance after all to make it straight thru bad life mortality towards Paradise maybe I hope... But some miserables like me don't even know it, when it comes to us we're amazed -- Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH... but I ran away from the seashore and never came back again without that secret knowledge: that it didn't want me there, that I was a fool to sit there in the first place, the sea has its waves, the man has his fireside, period.
October 25, 2022
Kerouac's Book Of Interior Chaos
Kerouac's novel "Big Sur" (1962) is a painful, self-lacerating portrayal of the writer's deterioration and nervous breakdown from alcoholism and a look back at the better days and friendships recounted in "On the Road". "The circles close in on the old heroes of the night", the narrator, Jack Duluoz, says as he visits Neal Cassady (Cody). The characters in the novel are thinly-disguised friends of Kerouac's from San Francisco's bohemian literary community of the 1950s.
The book's setting during August -- September, 1960 alternates between a remote cabin in California's Big Sur and the lively streets and bars of San Francisco. Kerouac could never decide where he wanted to be and was unable to be happy either alone or with others for long. Kerouac, exhausted by the publicity he received after "On the Road" and increasingly dependent on alcohol, accepts the offer of a friend to stay at his Big Sur cabin and recover his strength. While Kerouac responds to the wild beauty of the scenery, he also is frightened for himself. He writes the book looking back to the events and often addresses the reader directly about the breakdown that will occur at the book's end.
After three weeks, Kerouac finds he cannot bear the loneliness at Big Sur and tries to hitchhike to Monterrey. When he cannot thumb a ride, he realizes that America has changed from his younger days. Jack has a reunion with Cody, who has just been released from two years in jail for possession and with his wife Evelyn when he reaches San Francisco. He is devastated upon learning that his pet cat has died and returns to heavy drinking with his friends. Thoughts and dreams of the death of cats, mice, otters, snakes, fish, and people pervade the narrator's mind. The book zig-zags back to Big Sur, where the narrator comes close to a breakdown and back to San Francisco, where Cody fixes up Jack for what will be a tumultuous relationship with one of Cody's mistresses, Billie, who has a four year old son, Elliott. They are together for a week, before Jack feels hemmed in. Jack, Billie, Elliott and another couple return to Big Sur for the third time where on a chilly September evening, Jack goes mad from delirium tremens in a vividly and frighteningly realistically described scene.
"Big Sur" is written in Kerouac's "spontaneous prose" style with its lengthy stream-of consciousness sentences and paragraphs. With all his difficulties with alcoholism and breakdowns, the writing is convincing and often beautiful. Even the long, rambling poem written at Big Sur that concludes the book effectively shows the author's mental state. The book is also well-organized as its story develops clearly and inexorably. From the opening pages, the reader is left in no doubt of direction of the book and of its catastrophic confusion. The book has many descriptive passages and discussions of literature, Buddhism, nature, and of the narrator's dreams juxtaposed against the harsher reality of alcoholic deterioration. In an early passage, the narrator describes delirium tremens as follows:
"But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who don't drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility -- The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed you and raise you and make you strong and my God even educate you for 'life,' you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you to your sick silliness -- You feel sick in the greatest sense of the word.... "
The narrator shows self-pity as he tells his story, but most of the time he makes a painful attempt to be honest and to describe his life and his failures to live up to his dreams -- particularly his alcoholism, self-centeredness, inability to find peace, and inability to establish a lasting relationship with a woman. The book offers a harsh but moving self-portrayal of the author in his latter years who has lost his way.
"Big Sur" is one of Kerouac's better books and will interest readers who know "On the Road", "The Dharma Bums" or "Tristessa". In 2013, Michael Polish directed and wrote the screenplay for a flim version of "Big Sur" which is worth seeing but does not capture the anguish of the novel. The title of this review, "Kerouac's Book of Interior Chaos" is taken from William Everson's book "Birth of a Poet" as used in Tom Clark's biography of Kerouac.
Robin Friedman
Kerouac's novel "Big Sur" (1962) is a painful, self-lacerating portrayal of the writer's deterioration and nervous breakdown from alcoholism and a look back at the better days and friendships recounted in "On the Road". "The circles close in on the old heroes of the night", the narrator, Jack Duluoz, says as he visits Neal Cassady (Cody). The characters in the novel are thinly-disguised friends of Kerouac's from San Francisco's bohemian literary community of the 1950s.
The book's setting during August -- September, 1960 alternates between a remote cabin in California's Big Sur and the lively streets and bars of San Francisco. Kerouac could never decide where he wanted to be and was unable to be happy either alone or with others for long. Kerouac, exhausted by the publicity he received after "On the Road" and increasingly dependent on alcohol, accepts the offer of a friend to stay at his Big Sur cabin and recover his strength. While Kerouac responds to the wild beauty of the scenery, he also is frightened for himself. He writes the book looking back to the events and often addresses the reader directly about the breakdown that will occur at the book's end.
After three weeks, Kerouac finds he cannot bear the loneliness at Big Sur and tries to hitchhike to Monterrey. When he cannot thumb a ride, he realizes that America has changed from his younger days. Jack has a reunion with Cody, who has just been released from two years in jail for possession and with his wife Evelyn when he reaches San Francisco. He is devastated upon learning that his pet cat has died and returns to heavy drinking with his friends. Thoughts and dreams of the death of cats, mice, otters, snakes, fish, and people pervade the narrator's mind. The book zig-zags back to Big Sur, where the narrator comes close to a breakdown and back to San Francisco, where Cody fixes up Jack for what will be a tumultuous relationship with one of Cody's mistresses, Billie, who has a four year old son, Elliott. They are together for a week, before Jack feels hemmed in. Jack, Billie, Elliott and another couple return to Big Sur for the third time where on a chilly September evening, Jack goes mad from delirium tremens in a vividly and frighteningly realistically described scene.
"Big Sur" is written in Kerouac's "spontaneous prose" style with its lengthy stream-of consciousness sentences and paragraphs. With all his difficulties with alcoholism and breakdowns, the writing is convincing and often beautiful. Even the long, rambling poem written at Big Sur that concludes the book effectively shows the author's mental state. The book is also well-organized as its story develops clearly and inexorably. From the opening pages, the reader is left in no doubt of direction of the book and of its catastrophic confusion. The book has many descriptive passages and discussions of literature, Buddhism, nature, and of the narrator's dreams juxtaposed against the harsher reality of alcoholic deterioration. In an early passage, the narrator describes delirium tremens as follows:
"But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who don't drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility -- The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed you and raise you and make you strong and my God even educate you for 'life,' you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you to your sick silliness -- You feel sick in the greatest sense of the word.... "
The narrator shows self-pity as he tells his story, but most of the time he makes a painful attempt to be honest and to describe his life and his failures to live up to his dreams -- particularly his alcoholism, self-centeredness, inability to find peace, and inability to establish a lasting relationship with a woman. The book offers a harsh but moving self-portrayal of the author in his latter years who has lost his way.
"Big Sur" is one of Kerouac's better books and will interest readers who know "On the Road", "The Dharma Bums" or "Tristessa". In 2013, Michael Polish directed and wrote the screenplay for a flim version of "Big Sur" which is worth seeing but does not capture the anguish of the novel. The title of this review, "Kerouac's Book of Interior Chaos" is taken from William Everson's book "Birth of a Poet" as used in Tom Clark's biography of Kerouac.
Robin Friedman
March 15, 2015
No one, and I mean no one, writes alcoholic horror better than Jack. This book is powerful for those of us who have fought the demon. Jack, of course, succumbed to it and this savagely beautiful work was simply a precursor.
August 9, 2025
## Sulla strada, stagione 3
Jack Kerouac vaga ancora, questa volta in un’area più limitata, tra Big Sur - coste rocciose, natura selvaggia, una cabina messa a disposizione da Ferlinghetti, il burro Alf - Monterey e San Francisco. Neal Cassidy c’è. I sogni e la carica giovanile se ne sono ormai andati. Il successo letterario c’è stato. I soldi non sono più un problema. Le inquietudi esistenziali sono tutte lì e fanno male, amici amore sesso e alcol attenuano appena. In cerca di una pace interiore.
dirà: «È tutto qui, stai tranquillo, è tutto a posto, non prendere le cose troppo seriamente, è già abbastanza dura senza che tu debba andare fino in fondo a idee immaginarie come hai sempre detto tu stesso»
Jack Kerouac vaga ancora, questa volta in un’area più limitata, tra Big Sur - coste rocciose, natura selvaggia, una cabina messa a disposizione da Ferlinghetti, il burro Alf - Monterey e San Francisco. Neal Cassidy c’è. I sogni e la carica giovanile se ne sono ormai andati. Il successo letterario c’è stato. I soldi non sono più un problema. Le inquietudi esistenziali sono tutte lì e fanno male, amici amore sesso e alcol attenuano appena. In cerca di una pace interiore.
dirà: «È tutto qui, stai tranquillo, è tutto a posto, non prendere le cose troppo seriamente, è già abbastanza dura senza che tu debba andare fino in fondo a idee immaginarie come hai sempre detto tu stesso»
September 8, 2024
سومین کتابی که از جک خوندم (امیدوارم ناراحت نشه به اسم کوچیک صداش میکنم).
کتابای کروآک مثل آینهای هستن که اگه بهش نگاه کنید قیافهی جک رو میبینید. شاید بگید خب هر کتاب از هر نویسندهای همین ویژگی رو داره (یا باید داشته باشه)، اما اگه کتابی از کروآک خونده باشید میگیرید که چی میگم!
به همین دلیل بهنظرم خواننده نباید برای امتیازی که میخواد برای کتاب در نظر بگیره، «خیلی» به اتفاقات کتاب و پایانبندیِ اون توجه کنه چراکه کتاب فقط روایتگر بازهای از زندگی کروآکه.
چیزی که باید بهش توجه بشه اینه که کروآک چقدر تونسته اون سبکِ بداههنوازیِ (نگفتم بداههنویسی!) جز مانندِ دیوانهوارِ لعنتیش رو پیاده کنه. و چقدر تونسته در اینکه داستان از ریتم نیوفته موفق عمل کنه و اون پُرچانگیِ خاصش رو داشته باشه.
طبق موارد بالا بنظرم امتیاز ۳/۵ براش خوب باشه.
درخشانترین پارت کتاب جایی بود که کروآک احوالات یه آدم دائمالخمر رو توصیف میکنه. و چه غمانگیز که تصویری که اینجا از جک در آینهٔ این کتاب میبینیم به اون توصیفات خیلی شبیه.
مرسی که اینقدر صادق بودی جک و اصلاً هم اشکال نداره که به قول خودت، سر و وضعت هیچ به نویسندهها شباهتی نداره!
کتابای کروآک مثل آینهای هستن که اگه بهش نگاه کنید قیافهی جک رو میبینید. شاید بگید خب هر کتاب از هر نویسندهای همین ویژگی رو داره (یا باید داشته باشه)، اما اگه کتابی از کروآک خونده باشید میگیرید که چی میگم!
به همین دلیل بهنظرم خواننده نباید برای امتیازی که میخواد برای کتاب در نظر بگیره، «خیلی» به اتفاقات کتاب و پایانبندیِ اون توجه کنه چراکه کتاب فقط روایتگر بازهای از زندگی کروآکه.
چیزی که باید بهش توجه بشه اینه که کروآک چقدر تونسته اون سبکِ بداههنوازیِ (نگفتم بداههنویسی!) جز مانندِ دیوانهوارِ لعنتیش رو پیاده کنه. و چقدر تونسته در اینکه داستان از ریتم نیوفته موفق عمل کنه و اون پُرچانگیِ خاصش رو داشته باشه.
طبق موارد بالا بنظرم امتیاز ۳/۵ براش خوب باشه.
درخشانترین پارت کتاب جایی بود که کروآک احوالات یه آدم دائمالخمر رو توصیف میکنه. و چه غمانگیز که تصویری که اینجا از جک در آینهٔ این کتاب میبینیم به اون توصیفات خیلی شبیه.
مرسی که اینقدر صادق بودی جک و اصلاً هم اشکال نداره که به قول خودت، سر و وضعت هیچ به نویسندهها شباهتی نداره!
September 4, 2019
Que faire après les années de frénésie racontées dans Sur La Route, et quel sens donner à son existence quand on a vécu si intensément? Voilà bien je crois la question majeure posée par Kerouac dans Big Sur, question à laquelle on ne donnera pas de réponse bien sûr pour ne pas gâcher votre plaisir de lecteur(trice):)
Cette question, Kerouac a dû la tourner et la retourner dans sa tête maintes fois après 1957, et les années de folie qui ont suivi la parution de son manifeste beatnik. Aussi, quand il écrit Big Sur vers 1960, il est fatigué des excès en tous genres, des gens bigger than life, des beuveries qui vous laissent pour presque mort le lendemain matin et des voyages aux 4 coins des États-Unis sans aucun répit.
Le personnage principal de Big Sur, Jack Duluoz( avatar fictionnel de Kerouac) décide donc de passer 6 semaines seul, coupé de cette vie de tumulte, au bord de l'océan à Big Sur, Californie. Là, il y apprécie la nature apaisante, le silence ou au contraire le fracas des vagues et il jouit d'une solitude et d'un repos complets.
Mais très vite l'exalté en lui commence à douter de sa capacité à s'arracher à sa vie de bohème et au fait la nature est-elle si bienveillante que ça ? Peut-on laisser tomber une vie aussi intense pour se retirer soudain du monde et de son chaos ?
Kerouac nous livre un roman bien différent de Sur La Route: moins mouvementé, moins excessif, moins drogué, moins sexuellement débridé, même si on retrouve tout ça bien sûr mais dans des proportions moindres comme si Jack, le roi des Beatniks, s'était assagi à l'aube de la quarantaine.
Le roman est bien plus contemplatif que Sur la Route, Kerouac y livrant de très belles descriptions de Big Sur. On sent tout l'amour du personnage pour l'endroit et en même temps on pressent ce que cette retraite en pleine nature peut avoir d'incompatible avec la caractère de Jack. Et puis tout comme lui la nature est double: apaisée et déchaînée.
Mais plus que cela, c'est une très belle méditation sur la place de l'Homme dans le monde, son rapport à soi et aux autres, une interrogation sur les choix de vie que l'on fait et qui peuvent nous sembler mener dans une impasse, ainsi qu'un portait très efficace d'un homme qui se cherche encore à 40 ans et qui n'aura sans doute jamais fini de se chercher.
En cela Kerouac nous offre un second roman aux thèmes universels, extrêmement spirituel et un deuxième chef-d'œuvre à mon sens:)
Pour aller plus loin:
Voir Into The Wild(2007) de Sean Penn.
Écouter California Saga(1973) et plus particulièrement le morceau Big Sur, et également Until I Die(1971) des Beach Boys.
Cette question, Kerouac a dû la tourner et la retourner dans sa tête maintes fois après 1957, et les années de folie qui ont suivi la parution de son manifeste beatnik. Aussi, quand il écrit Big Sur vers 1960, il est fatigué des excès en tous genres, des gens bigger than life, des beuveries qui vous laissent pour presque mort le lendemain matin et des voyages aux 4 coins des États-Unis sans aucun répit.
Le personnage principal de Big Sur, Jack Duluoz( avatar fictionnel de Kerouac) décide donc de passer 6 semaines seul, coupé de cette vie de tumulte, au bord de l'océan à Big Sur, Californie. Là, il y apprécie la nature apaisante, le silence ou au contraire le fracas des vagues et il jouit d'une solitude et d'un repos complets.
Mais très vite l'exalté en lui commence à douter de sa capacité à s'arracher à sa vie de bohème et au fait la nature est-elle si bienveillante que ça ? Peut-on laisser tomber une vie aussi intense pour se retirer soudain du monde et de son chaos ?
Kerouac nous livre un roman bien différent de Sur La Route: moins mouvementé, moins excessif, moins drogué, moins sexuellement débridé, même si on retrouve tout ça bien sûr mais dans des proportions moindres comme si Jack, le roi des Beatniks, s'était assagi à l'aube de la quarantaine.
Le roman est bien plus contemplatif que Sur la Route, Kerouac y livrant de très belles descriptions de Big Sur. On sent tout l'amour du personnage pour l'endroit et en même temps on pressent ce que cette retraite en pleine nature peut avoir d'incompatible avec la caractère de Jack. Et puis tout comme lui la nature est double: apaisée et déchaînée.
Mais plus que cela, c'est une très belle méditation sur la place de l'Homme dans le monde, son rapport à soi et aux autres, une interrogation sur les choix de vie que l'on fait et qui peuvent nous sembler mener dans une impasse, ainsi qu'un portait très efficace d'un homme qui se cherche encore à 40 ans et qui n'aura sans doute jamais fini de se chercher.
En cela Kerouac nous offre un second roman aux thèmes universels, extrêmement spirituel et un deuxième chef-d'œuvre à mon sens:)
Pour aller plus loin:
Voir Into The Wild(2007) de Sean Penn.
Écouter California Saga(1973) et plus particulièrement le morceau Big Sur, et également Until I Die(1971) des Beach Boys.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 19, 2020
Big Sur-prise !!! What a bad pun !! I guess COVID isolation makes one come with these.
I have often read about journeys on the US West coast and to the Big Sur by others. I almost attempted it once but took a different route driving to Vegas from San Francisco.
Kerouac’s travelogues had sounded legendary with quite a few of my friends referring in our book conversations. This was a wonderful surprise though I think I was expecting it. The sentences are as long as possibly the journeys you might take to the Big Sur. The storyline - if there was one I missed it - is a large mass of thoughts passing through the author’s mind. Something like what will be on your mind let’s say when you on a long drive. With the music playing and everyone in the car is in their own reverie.
““This is the first time I’ve hitch hiked in years and I soon begin to see that things have changed in America, you cant get a ride any more (but of course especially on a strictly tourist road like this coast highway with no trucks or business)—Sleek long stationwagon after wagon comes sleering by smoothly, all colors of the rainbow and pastel at that, pink, blue, white, the husband is in the driver’s seat with a long ridiculous vacationist hat with a long baseball visor making him look witless and idiot—Beside him sits wifey, the boss of America, wearing dark glasses and sneering, even if he wanted to pick me up or anybody up she wouldn’t let him”
Loved the references to the various experiences en route. I will definitely read more of Kerouac ( hope I get the time to do it ) and love his easy writing style.
Recommended
I have often read about journeys on the US West coast and to the Big Sur by others. I almost attempted it once but took a different route driving to Vegas from San Francisco.
Kerouac’s travelogues had sounded legendary with quite a few of my friends referring in our book conversations. This was a wonderful surprise though I think I was expecting it. The sentences are as long as possibly the journeys you might take to the Big Sur. The storyline - if there was one I missed it - is a large mass of thoughts passing through the author’s mind. Something like what will be on your mind let’s say when you on a long drive. With the music playing and everyone in the car is in their own reverie.
““This is the first time I’ve hitch hiked in years and I soon begin to see that things have changed in America, you cant get a ride any more (but of course especially on a strictly tourist road like this coast highway with no trucks or business)—Sleek long stationwagon after wagon comes sleering by smoothly, all colors of the rainbow and pastel at that, pink, blue, white, the husband is in the driver’s seat with a long ridiculous vacationist hat with a long baseball visor making him look witless and idiot—Beside him sits wifey, the boss of America, wearing dark glasses and sneering, even if he wanted to pick me up or anybody up she wouldn’t let him”
Loved the references to the various experiences en route. I will definitely read more of Kerouac ( hope I get the time to do it ) and love his easy writing style.
Recommended
June 30, 2023
I don’t know why I did this to myself.
The thought of being stuck in an isolated California cabin with these wankers took me back to my brief time in art school; listening to dreadful night-scrawled poetry in the canteen as a bunch of tossers sought to shout their profound waffle.
As I slogged through ‘Big Sur’s’ ‘gloopy’ fucking beatnik twattery I had many of the same reactions I felt while reading ‘On the Road’. This autobiographical novel simply annoyed me with its rambling, introspective un-stoppable-ness. I don’t have much sympathy for narratives of big drinkers who bring about a daily existential crisis by getting pissed and fannying about with like-minded drinkers, so I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t enjoy this. More fool me for feeling compelled to give Kerouac another go.
Maybe I’m just a philistine, un-attuned to the clever nuances of beat think, but the work of Burroughs and Ken Kesey and even Ginsberg doesn’t have me rolling my eyes so violently as I read.
Yes, as always there are some stunning sentences, some lovely insights in amongst all the ‘goopy’, stream of consciousness, cliff hanger to a mental breakdown junk in there, but is there anything as tedious as someone recounting their dreams? And there are at least 5 examples of dream narratives in this hell ride!
The thought of being stuck in an isolated California cabin with these wankers took me back to my brief time in art school; listening to dreadful night-scrawled poetry in the canteen as a bunch of tossers sought to shout their profound waffle.
As I slogged through ‘Big Sur’s’ ‘gloopy’ fucking beatnik twattery I had many of the same reactions I felt while reading ‘On the Road’. This autobiographical novel simply annoyed me with its rambling, introspective un-stoppable-ness. I don’t have much sympathy for narratives of big drinkers who bring about a daily existential crisis by getting pissed and fannying about with like-minded drinkers, so I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t enjoy this. More fool me for feeling compelled to give Kerouac another go.
Maybe I’m just a philistine, un-attuned to the clever nuances of beat think, but the work of Burroughs and Ken Kesey and even Ginsberg doesn’t have me rolling my eyes so violently as I read.
Yes, as always there are some stunning sentences, some lovely insights in amongst all the ‘goopy’, stream of consciousness, cliff hanger to a mental breakdown junk in there, but is there anything as tedious as someone recounting their dreams? And there are at least 5 examples of dream narratives in this hell ride!
October 5, 2009
ok i still have a few pages left of jack's drunken manic breakdown, but i have to say that i am just not impressed with kerouac, at least not based on what i've read. i read on the road years ago, and all i really remember is that i wasn't significantly impressed with it, and i couldn't get past his misogyny. And now, 20 years later, I feel the same way. I respect kerouac for what he was at the time, the new kind of literature he helped create, the irreverence for convention, the love of art and attempts at making meaning of life in the postwar 50s ozzie and harriet world. brilliant? i'm not sure, maybe, in some way. i saw an exhibit at the NY public library of some of his artifacts, the scroll he wrote on the road with, a fantasy baseball league he created as a child, complete with elaborate stats and baseball cards. but if he was so brilliant, why was his opinion of women so low? He seems incapable of recognizing women as intelligent people, they are nothing more than sexual objects to him, only significant in their relations to men, and i can't ignore it.
but i do like thinking of big sur, thanks for that jack.
but i do like thinking of big sur, thanks for that jack.
July 14, 2011
Big Sur is the second Jack Kerouac work that I've committed myself to reading. The first was On The Road, which I left about a third of the way in. I was unable to connect to it at the time. I feel that reading Big Sur at this specific time in my life was an excellent choice being that many of the topics Kerouac touches on in this work are the same as those I've been mentally wrestling with in the past several months, i.e. human interconnectedness, role of love in the chaos of life, relationship between the living and the dead, symbolism in nature, human incapability to fully comprehend/empathise with other humans, and the list goes on. Kerouac's writing style, stream of conscious, was thought provoking. It kept my full attention and led me to pause at the end of sentences, paragraphs, pages or chapters to contemplate what he was attempting to convey and to relate it to my own life. It's been a few days since I've finished the book and I still find my own thoughts being structured in his writing style. In a way, it's led me to see my own mind from a different perspective. Big Sur may not be for everyone but I do encourage at least giving it a try.
July 10, 2014
The most harrowing account of alooholism I have ever read. As a recovering alcoholic myself, I found I could relate to his story, as I can also to Kerouac's life. This was a well written book, (some of his quite frankly are not). As he descended into alcoholism he could no longer write with any real coherence, and became an obnoxious fool who was no longer taken seriously anywhere, and was no longer wanted anywhere, not even in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. The kind hearted and softspoken writer featured on the Steve Allen show in 1958 turned into someone who was drunk all the time, spouting racist comments and radical right wing comments in bars. In fact he is probably the worst alcoholic famous writer we have ever had.
That said, this story of his life right after the fame of "On the Road" is vividly portrayed and honest. Brutally honest- the shame, paranoia, and alcoholic delusions and hallucinations are all too real here. JK never wanted fame and he could not handle it. At the end of the book Kerouac seems to recover, momentarily, for his next adventure. This book was probably his last good one, and it resonated with me and disturbed me, which it should anyone.
That said, this story of his life right after the fame of "On the Road" is vividly portrayed and honest. Brutally honest- the shame, paranoia, and alcoholic delusions and hallucinations are all too real here. JK never wanted fame and he could not handle it. At the end of the book Kerouac seems to recover, momentarily, for his next adventure. This book was probably his last good one, and it resonated with me and disturbed me, which it should anyone.
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